The Bloecher Effect

– by Don Ecsedy, March 5, 2013

Ted Bloecher discovered the Roswell news stories in the mid-1960s and
included an account in his excellent Report on the UFO Wave of 1947.
However, his section on Roswell displays his unfamiliarity with the
story. He confuses the chronology, but the Effect itself is the splitting
off of the last sentence of the press release from what preceded it,
turning the ‘press conference’ in Ft Worth into a consequence of the news
media’s reaction to the press release. I’ll repeat it: the disc was flown
to higher headquarters in reaction to the news media’s reaction to the
press release.

The last line of the press release: “and subsequently loaned [likely a
transcription error for "flown"] by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

Although Bloecher made this error, he would not be the last to do so. We
can excuse Ted; he didn’t have the resources or the time to do much more
than scan the few news stories he had found. Ted didn’t suffer from the
Bloecher Effect, just a lack of information. What is intriguing, though,
is how the Effect is manifested in the work of later investigators and
researchers: Moore, Berlitz, Friedman, Pflock, AFOSI.

The last line is the only moment of the press release that we have
hard evidence for: the Ft Worth press conference. We have the pictures.
It is indisputable. ‘Ft Worth’ has an ontological weight that the rest of
the press release does not. I think this makes it easy to divide the
substance, calf off Ft Worth and make it an effect of a cause, and then
to give it a reason: “to get the press off our backs”.

And if you allow yourself to accept it, then you are a victim of the
Bloecher Effect.

It appears I’ve been ‘Bloeched’ in the Roswell workout. In dividing
the story into five phases to establish a true chronology, I made Ft
Worth the last phase, which it isn’t. Chronlogically, the Brazel
interview is the last Phase, rather than the penultimate one. I’ll have
to go back and rework it. It is important because both Ft Worth and the
Brazel interview share language and concepts. The reporters interviewing
Brazel in the Roswell Daily Record office would have gotten the Ft Worth
story off the newspaper’s AP teletype. There is no other reason for the
focus of the interview to have been on a weather balloon and its kite